deftly.vc welcomes LP Jordan F. [founder, CoachUp]

Jordan Fliegel is a serial entrepreneur and is currently an MD, Techstars, and Chairman, CoachUp. A few words about his journey:

My founder story

CoachUp came from my heart, as I was a mediocre basketball player who benefited from having a private coach (Greg Kristof) who remains a lifelong friend and took me under his wing, really taught me how to play basketball, and helped me develop confidence that I could achieve whatever I set my mind to, basketball, school or otherwise by really studying it, breaking it down into fine details, and by working hard and mastering the small steps. In the summers home from college, and then later when home from playing professionally overseas, I started a small business coaching kids in basketball, similar to what Greg did with me. I realized that this could scale — there are millions of former college and pro athletes across every sport, 40M+ kids in the US who could benefit from 1:1 coaching, and plenty of gyms, parks and fields to conduct the training sessions; however, no platform existed to bring it all together and make it easy, creating trust and transparency on all sides, handling payments, insurance, scheduling, reviews — so I decided to go build it and CoachUp was born! It's now the largest sports coaching company in America with over 15,000 coaches and hundreds of thousands of athletes on the platform.

My CoachUp "deftly" moment

Early on, we needed to find a lead engineer to join our 2-person team. We wanted to find someone great who could join us full-time in our office in Cambridge, MA. Since we were working out of a coworking center at the Cambridge Innovation Center, I figured maybe there would be an engineer in the building looking for a new opportunity, so I printed out a bunch of tear-away flyers mentioning our company and the role, and posted them everywhere I could throughout the building, including the bathrooms! Then, Gabe Durazo walked in to our office one day holding a ripped out tear away from one of the flyers, and said "I have a ticket" and we said come on board! Gabe joined our founding team as lead engineer and is one of the best engineers and overall people I've ever had the privilege of working with, so we certainly got lucky, but also created our own luck by thinking outside of the box to market the role.

Why I joined the deftly community

I want to do more with Arie!

Excited to have your backing. Welcome aboard Jordan!